


Year of the Rat

by somepallings



Category: Jupiter Ascending (2015)
Genre: But given that she's a self-insert of me because I want to give him a hug so badly, F/M, I figured that's the right tag, It's really only Chicanery/OFC if you squint
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-03-20
Updated: 2020-03-20
Packaged: 2021-02-28 23:19:51
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 978
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/23225434
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/somepallings/pseuds/somepallings
Summary: 2020 is the year of the rat.
Relationships: Chicanery Night/Original Female Character(s)
Comments: 2
Kudos: 5





	Year of the Rat

Earth booze was getting harder to come by as more and more of Chicanery’s contacts stopped responding to his FTLs. This wasn’t stopping him from gesturing wildly with his glass and spilling sharp-smelling spirits all over his lap.

“It’s all hers now, of course,” he said vaguely, pointing at a planet hovering inches from his nose, “Earth. I suppose it always was hers, really.”

The pig splice he was talking to nodded her head sympathetically.

Chicanery stood up and walked through the projected planet, waving his free hand around until the image changed to a much closer view of Earth, then closer again, then closer still until they were looking at an ever-changing projection of Earth life. Things looked rather chaotic.

“What are they doing?” the pig splice asked softly.

“Oh, it’s a pandemic!” Chicanery replied, a little louder than he had meant to. Well, a lot louder than he had meant to. “They have them every… hundred years. Or so.”

“A pandemic?”

“Yes! They don’t… they _can’t_ recode, they have no juice, so they have… diseases.” He snorted, collapsing back into his seat. “They _have_ no juice- they _are_ juice.”

He took a gulp of his liquor and coughed. The pig splice rubbed his back. Wind howled through some distant part of the half-ruined refinery. The section they were in, where all of the surviving splices indentured here had gathered, was being held together almost with wishes and willpower alone. They had nowhere else to go, now that they were owned by an Entitled who wanted nothing to do with them and who was determined even to pretend that they did not exist.

“Or they would have been. If her majesty’s recurrence and that stupid dog boy hadn’t smashed their way through the grav-hull and ruined my refinery.”

“I remember. What a shame, Mr Night. After you had worked so hard all that time.”

“4000 years, I ran this refinery. I was born here. It was my home. It was my _nest_.” He said mopily, looking into his glass at the dregs it contained. “When I learned Lord Balem was coming here, I was _proud_. I thought he was coming to _congratulate_ me. We really were getting excellent results from the skim…”

A tear dropped onto his arm. He looked at it stupidly. It had come from his own eye, so he was crying again. Wonderful. He scrubbed his eyes with the back of his hand.

The pig splice took a sip of her own drink. She was not drunk, but no-one liked to be totally sober around Chicanery when he was in one of these moods. He knew they took it in turns to babysit him when he was maudlin and inebriated, but she seemed more sympathetic than most.

“She thinks she’s so much better than them. She’s not,” he said, his own voice sounding distant to his ears, “She’s a standard-issue Abrasax, whatever she thinks.”

The hologram image of Earth was looping through the same scenes, over and over. He gestured, spilling the final drops of alcohol from his glass onto the floor, and the image changed once again to the solar system, a tiny blue earth spinning in the darkness.

“One day she’ll turn up again, just like her horrible son did. It might not be this plague that brings her but sooner than she likes she will be staring death in the face and she’ll be back to take possession of the only thing that will save her.”

His pig splice friend nodded. She had heard this all before. She said she thought he was probably right. She rubbed his back again, which was soothing. He tipped his head back and began to grind his back teeth.

“Why did they make you?” he asked, vaguely.

“Oh. Raising young,” she replied, “I worked in the hatchery and with the womb-tanks.”

He laughed a little hysterically, leaning his head further back, encouraging her to scratch the back of his neck.

“That’s why they send you to placate me so often, I imagine.” he said, his voice trailing off as he began to lose his grip on his empty glass. She took it from him and put in gently on the ground.

“I hatched Mr Greeghan,” she said, very quietly, “I raised him from the egg.”

“Oh. Greeghan.” Chicanery replied, screwing up his eyes, his voice tight with misery. “And Tskalikin. And all the others we lost because of all of this. Entitled nonsense. Every one of us is worth ten Abrasax brats.”

The pig splice was no longer shocked to hear him speak this way about Entitleds. In their present living arrangement, who would care? There was no-one to report him to. The Entitled to whom they now owed their loyalty would probably have laughed and slapped her rat splice on the back if she had heard him say so.

She kept scratching the back of Chicanery’s neck until she heard that comforting tooth-grinding sound rumbling from the back of his throat. She watched the hologram solar system spinning past. Jupiter, the planet they were on, passed straight through Chicanery’s backwards-drooping head, making her laugh.

“Don’t you… laugh at me,” he said, his eyes fluttering open, a struggle against his tiredness and insobriety, “You will see that I’m right… one day.” his head fell forward and only with a sudden jerk did he prevent himself from falling off the sofa that they sat on.

She opened her arms. “Come here, Mr Night. Lie down. You need your rest.”

He drooped again, this time towards her waiting lap, where he curled up with his head cradled on her arm. She kept rubbing the back of his neck and slowly the rumbling sound of his grinding teeth subsided as he fell asleep.

The solar system continued to wheel around them, and the wind continued to howl elsewhere.


End file.
